when is a famine genocide?

[Diamond]

1) why would I bother finding evidence for what is the commonly-held orthodoxy? Pick up any newspaper that mentioned it in the last 70 years and they´ll say the same thing.

This is nonsense.

Whether the Holomodor was a genocidal event or not is one of the most heavily contested areas of the history of genocide.

2) I was looking to elicit exactly what the difference between the Holomodor and the Bengal Famine was for the people who view them as qualitatively different.

What does this mean?

3) I don´t see the semantics here as being particularly important. Certainly not in comparison to the self-justification of western capitalism that is related to these two cases.

How can you argue that semantics are unimportant when your original argument, even the title of this thread, is a semantic question?

 

[Idaho]

I meant that if Ireland hadn't been a colony, food production wouldn't have been organised like that.

again, same thing: The British Empire was founded on an toxic combination of Malthusianism (the idea that overpopulation naturally resulted in famine, with population levels self-correcting) and laissez-faire (radical free trade). So there didn´t need to be a real shortage of food to create a famine, just scarcity. A bad harvest in the British Empire could produce a famine, because poor farmers couldn´t pay inflated prices for scarce goods, leading bigger producers to either store food (for speculative purposes) or export it to areas which had the money to pay for it.

This happened sufficiently often under the British Empire to suggest essentially that millions of deaths were a fair price for the colonial economic system to continue functioning normally.

I think both these comments are highly speculative. Without being able to rerun history, there is no way of knowing how Irish agriculture would have developed, nor any idea of what the population of Ireland would have been without the relative prosperity the British empire brought.

 

[ymu]

Might help to have a definition of genocide which we all agree on.

This is what the UN thought it was in 1948:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

* (a) Killing members of the group;
* (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
* (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
* (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
* (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html

 

[Idris2002]

ukarine there was food and deliberate policy of the state to withhold food.
bengal the british empire was a might busy fighting for its life in a gobal war at the time no war probably no famine or at least a better relief effort.

Except that for decades before the 'global war' India had been struck by recurrent famines - and the response of the British colonial authorities was consistently and deliberately inadequate.

 

[Spion]

I think both these comments are highly speculative. Without being able to rerun history, there is no way of knowing how Irish agriculture would have developed, nor any idea of what the population of Ireland would have been without the relative prosperity the British empire brought.

You what?

 

[IMR]

I think both these comments are highly speculative. Without being able to rerun history, there is no way of knowing how Irish agriculture would have developed, nor any idea of what the population of Ireland would have been without the relative prosperity the British empire brought.

The majority of Irish people were dependent on potatoes. There was nowhere else in Europe which came close to the proportion of arable land devoted to their cultivation - around 32% in Ireland. The next nearest was Prussia, at 11%.

It is impossible to construct a coherent argument as to why that was the case, without reference to British settlement and rule over Ireland. The history of this isn't hard to find.

 

[ymu]

You what?

Indeed.

How long did it take for the population to drop from 8 million to 3 million? I forget. That was mostly slavery though, wasn't it? That well-known bringer of economic prosperity to every nation it was practised on.

 

[Idaho]

You what?

If it fucked over everyone it wouldn't have worked so well, grown so much for so long. The British Empire spread the agricultural revolution, and later the industrial revolution across the world. Trying to recast it as a period of unending misery which dragged humanity back into the dark ages is just daft.

 

[ericjarvis]

It's actually very simple.

Some years back some right wing US economists set up a propaganda web site purporting to detail deaths caused directly by governments. In order to further their anti left agenda they included deaths caused by famine under left wing governments and not right wing governments. It's a propaganda ploy that too many people have swallowed completely uncritically. So that now the default position for most people is that if you starved to death in the Soviet Union you were murdered by Stalin, whereas if you died in a work camp in the Congo under the Belgians it was an unfortunate accident.

I've actually debated this point several times with a well known right wing economist and every time he'll retreat from the position that Stalin was the most murderous dictator of all time. Then a few weeks later he'll be saying exactly the same things. It's either a psychological blind spot or a deliberate distortion.

 

[Idris2002]

If it fucked over everyone it wouldn't have worked so well, grown so much for so long. The British Empire spread the agricultural revolution, and later the industrial revolution across the world. Trying to recast it as a period of unending misery which dragged humanity back into the dark ages is just daft.

The practice of landlordism in Ireland did not 'spread the agricultural revolution' - on the contrary, it retarded the agricultural development of Ireland.

What was the author and title of the last book on Irish history you read, amadán?

 

[butchersapron]

I think both these comments are highly speculative. Without being able to rerun history, there is no way of knowing how Irish agriculture would have developed, nor any idea of what the population of Ireland would have been without the relative prosperity the British empire brought.

This is just reverse speculation though. What we do have is records of what the English/British landowners and authorities actually did to Irish agriculture, the intentions behind those actions and the results. I'm talking about the Landlord system, using land for flax, for export cattle the Corn Laws etc All aimed to make the Irish economy as a whole work for the benefit of the British rulers and their proxies and all complicit in developing the conditions for the famine.

 

[butchersapron]

If it fucked over everyone it wouldn't have worked so well, grown so much for so long. The British Empire spread the agricultural revolution, and later the industrial revolution across the world. Trying to recast it as a period of unending misery which dragged humanity back into the dark ages is just daft.

You're mental. Most of the countries we had as colonies still haven't had their agricultural revolution and continue to be blighted by landlordism, which is only coming apart under modern day pressures of tings like the IMF and global capital mobility.

 

[Spion]

The British Empire spread the agricultural revolution, and later the industrial revolution across the world.

And if you think it did that in a way that replicated what happened here, then you're very ill informed. The Empire locked its subject countries into a world economy, true. But it invariably did this by forcing them to produce one or two commodities, usually at the expense of existing and developing forms of agriculture and industry.

Other posters have picked you up on the Irish landlord system. One country I do know about - Egypt - had a nascent domestic cotton and other industries utterly destroyed by the British Empire which only wanted the country as a giant cotton farm for its mills at home.

Trying to recast it as a period of unending misery which dragged humanity back into the dark ages is just daft.

It's quite possible to have misery and progress in history. You can't measure the latter by the presence or otherwise of the former

 

[butchersapron]

In fact, if you really believe what you wrote above Idaho, the person you should be going easy on is Stalin.

 

[Idris2002]

In fact, if you really believe what you wrote above Idaho, the person you should be going easy on is Stalin.

'We are one hundred years behind the west, we have ten years to make good the difference, or they will crush us'.

 

[Spion]

I keep meaning to read this, but have never got round to it. Has anyone here read it?

Late Victorian Holocausts

"The book's main conclusion is that the deaths of 30-60 million people killed in famines all over the world during the later part of the 19th century were caused by laissez faire and Malthusian economic ideology of the colonial governments."

 

[Idaho]

The practice of landlordism in Ireland did not 'spread the agricultural revolution' - on the contrary, it retarded the agricultural development of Ireland.

What was the author and title of the last book on Irish history you read, amadán?

The last one I read was about 15 years ago. I can't remember the name of the author. He was quite a famous writer on the subject.. and had a very Irish name

You're mental. Most of the countries we had as colonies still haven't had their agricultural revolution and continue to be blighted by landlordism, which is only coming apart under modern day pressures of tings like the IMF and global capital mobility.

It's quite possible to have misery and progress in history. You can't measure the latter by the presence or otherwise of the former.

...

"The book's main conclusion is that the deaths of 30-60 million people killed in famines all over the world during the later part of the 19th century were caused by laissez faire and Malthusian economic ideology of the colonial governments."

I am not contesting that the British Empire spread it's fair share of misery famine and death. What I am contesting is that anyone can say "If only there hadn't been the British Empire - then all those people wouldn't have died and the world would be better". You can't isolate such an immensly significant historical edifice from the fabric of the past and attempt to get any meaningful understanding from the hole you have left.

Yes it destroyed emerging economies and created patron client relationships which cripple countries to this day, yes it destroyed local economic systems, political systems, wiped out nations, ethnic groups, etc. But we can't predict whether an alternative would have been better or worse. We can't rerun. You said it best yourself Spion. History readily shows up the bright spots of misery, assessing how much benefit and progress people make is somewhat more difficult.

 

[dilute micro]

I heard it was William the Conqueror's battle cry to his men at Hastings.

"fall back!" might have been the actual one.

 

[co-op]

It'

Some years back some right wing US economists set up a propaganda web site purporting to detail deaths caused directly by governments. In order to further their anti left agenda they included deaths caused by famine under left wing governments and not right wing governments.

Particularly ironic really, given that (whatever you think of the USSR or China under Mao for that matter) it's clear that the overall famine rate dropped massively.

Figures for starvation in Czarist Russia are hard to estimate (after all the people starving were, by definition, not important) but it was probably a couple of million every winter, a few in every village.

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

When it's the result of the systematic denial of people of the means of living. When there is abundance alongside the commodification of those very means of living.

 

[JimW]

Particularly ironic really, given that (whatever you think of the USSR or China under Mao for that matter) it's clear that the overall famine rate dropped massively.

Apparently even in the worst years of the Great Leap famines the death rate in the three worst affected provinces only slightly surpassed what had been endemic across vast swathes of India for decades, something Bengal famine aside that never goes in these Black Books.
As you imply, life expectancy in China in '49 was in the mid-30s and was 68 or 70 IIRC in 1978 (ten years more than India and of course this greater health and food security accompanying a population boom) when the collective era gave way to 'Reform and Opening'. The fifties famines are a massive indictment of Leninist bureaucracy - there were natural causes but the deaths were the result of an insistence on enforcing central grain requisition quotas and refusing to report the famine to higher authorities out of fear of appearing to be against/not enthusiastic enough about the Great Leap policy - in areas where conscientious/brave cadres did report the famine, the quotas were done away with and aid was sent. Which is hardly consistent with it being deliberate genocide.